Announcing the third OpenNTF XPages Development Contest - Let's double the Prizes

Posted by Niklas Heidloff on February 8, 2012

OpenNTF is happy to announce the third development
contest on OpenNTF.Org
sponsored by IBM Business Partner We4IT.
Contribute your open source project between now and June 3th and have a
chance to win $800 for controls and $1600 for full applications.

With this contest OpenNTF and We4IT want
to further increase the number of XPages open source projects to help with
the adoption of XPages.

Stefan Sucker, CEO of We4IT, calls for the third entries to the third
XPages Development Contest saying:

"For a quite a while now I have felt
that the future of Notes applications has lain in the browser. And
over recent months this view has been supported by the amount of XPages
development work that We4IT has been commissioned to deliver. The
majority of this work has been in transforming existing applications into
modern web apps.

I know it can be difficult to learn new
technologies; we have been down this road ourselves. Now we would
like to help encourage other developers in their own journey.

In the last OpenNTF competition, both
the number and quality of the entries was impressive. Ultimately
it was these outstanding and innovative results that have led us to again,
to exclusively sponsor the OpenNTF XPagesDevelopment Contest"

Bruce Elgort, OpenNTF chairman, said:

"The developers who have entered
the first two development contests have given the XPages development community
an incredible wealth of controls, library controls, mobile, social and
full blown apps. With the 3rd contest I see this trend continuing and expect
to see a significant increase in the number of developers and entires that
are submitted to the contest. Good luck to all who participate and a big
thank you in advance from the IBM XPages community."

1) Re-usable controls can be custom controls or library/Java controls.
Reusable controls have typically parameters to configure and use them in
different contexts. The controls need to be documented to make them consumable
by other OpenNTF developers. Especially for custom controls it needs to
be documented which design elements to copy to use the controls in other
NSFs. There are many good examples on http://xpages.info/contest.

2) Applications contain or integrate all necessary functionality for users
to fulfill certain tasks. Examples are the IBM templates, e.g. teamroom,
or other examples listed on http://xpages.info/downloads.
Applications also need to be reusable, e.g. by externalizing all custom
specific configuration, providing customizability options, documentation,
etc.

Implementation: Participants can choose how to implement their applications.
There are no prerequisites to use certain technologies other than that
the solutions need to work in XPages. All contributions need to work on
Lotus Domino 8.5.3. They can also require Upgrade Pack 1 or the latest
XPages Extension Library from OpenNTF.

Awards and Recognition

There will be different prizes for the two categories. All prizes will
be cash prizes this time. Winners can decide whether they want to receive
Amazon vouchers or whether they want to get paid via PayPal.

1) Controls
The two winners of this category will receive $800 each.

2) Applications
The two winners of this category will receive $1600 each.

OpenNTF will also create videos and screenshots (if not done by contributors),
blog about these controls and have them put on XPages.info
as done for the first and second contest.

Criteria

We'll use the following criteria when judging the contributions:

1) Reusability, consumability and documentation
2) "Wow" factor and completeness of solution
3) Overall business value
4) Amount of work to build the submission(s)
5) New this time: Special consideration will be given to submissions of
social and/or mobile applications
The judging will be done by OpenNTF again but we invite people from the
community to participate in the judging. In that case they obviously cannot
participate themselves and cannot judge submissions from colleagues in
the same company.

Eligibility

Everyone can participate and submit nominations, with the exception of
the OpenNTF Board of Directors. While members of the Board may not personally
submit a nomination, other employees of their respective companies may
submit. A contribution can be submitted by more than one person but the
award would have to be shared between the submitters. Winners should also
be aware of any rules that their employer, state or local company has regarding
participating in contests and winning prizes. A nomination can be done
by more than one person but the award would have to be splitted.

Prerequisites for valid Submissions

Any open source project may be submitted for consideration for this contest
that has been accepted for either the Apache or GPL catalog on OpenNTF.
All snippets need to be posted under the Apache license in XSnippets. The
following points describe in details these prerequisites.

1. Authors need to be approved OpenNTF contributors, e.g. they need to
be covered by an ICLA or CCLA (details).
2. Submissions have to be posted under one of the four accepted OpenNTF
licences. For example for Apache submissions the Apache license has to
be applied correctly (details).
3. Submissions must have been cleared by the ip-manager at openntf dot
org so that they can be added to either the Apache or GPL catalog. Contact
the IP manager if you need to use third party code.
4. Submissions will be evaluated on Domino 8.5.3 with or without extension
library. Non-working submissions or submissions that judges cannot get
to work will not be considered. No other product versions will be used
for evaluation.
5. Submissions will be evaluated on the most common browsers Firefox, IE,
Chrome and Safari (latest releases). If you're aware of issues of your
submission in certain browsers please let us know.
6. Submissions need at least to provide two or three paragraphs of documentation,
some screenshots and in the optimal case a short demo video (all in English).
7. All new project releases are eligible that have been created after the
second contest ended (12/02/2011). Existing releases can not be nominated
but parts of existing projects can be reused and extended.

Submissions

You need to have the code on OpenNTF and send a mail to support at openntf
dot org and ip-manager at openntf dot org (for IP clearance).

Schedule

June 3th 2012: Deadline for submissions
One or two weeks later: Announcement of winners

Promotion

OpenNTF would appreciate if you could
help us to promote this contest.